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Freshly Exhumed (105597) writes 'Canada is poised to buy 65 Lockheed Martin Corp F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, sources familiar with the process told Reuters. A detailed, 18-month review of Canada's fighter jet needs has concluded that the government should skip a new competition and proceed with the C$9 billion ($8.22 billion) purchase, three sources said. When the F-35 purchase was first proposed, Canadians were alarmed by the colossal price tag, and also that no fly-off competition had been conducted or was planned. This latest news is sure to rekindle criticism that the RCAF's requirements seem to have been written after the fact to match the F-35's capabilities (or lack thereof)."

Yes, let's absolutely buy the jets that can't stay up in the air and cost ridiculous amounts to purchase and maintain when they do manage not to crash!In rougher climates than they're designed for! Instead of something cheaper and more rugged that would be just fine for our purposes!

I'm wondering what the US is offering countries buying these aircraft. Japan was looking at both the F-35 and the Eurofighter, with the Eurofighter being obviously a better fit for them in pretty much every way. Yet they went with the much more expensive and still not debugged F-35. Now Canada too.

You're right about them not being for dogfighting over Canadian territories, the F35 is not that kind of aircraft.The F35 is a bomber that can run bombing missions without an escort (when not expecting to meet state of the art interceptors).

What's wrong with a few SuperHornets? Extra survivability in case of an engine failure; both interception and ground attack (unlike the attack-only F35); easier to maintain; larger fuel capacity than the original Hornet; they actually FLY.

Only recently in Australia did the government suggest that it was going to purchase the F-35 as well. This all became clear in the same budget that suggested raising the pension age to 70 and an increase in taxes, and prompted much outrage.

Despite the flaws in the F-35, this purchase seems to be more of a five-eyes strategic thing, than it is any burning need to buy these planes.

This all became clear in the same budget that suggested raising the pension age to 70 and an increase in taxes, and prompted much outrage.

It's pretty much a universal developed world problem that pensions pay out too much and governments run large deficits. Everyone will need to raise their pension ages and raise their taxes/cut spending.

Everyone will need to raise their pension ages and raise their taxes/cut spending.

Alternatively, we could roll back our immense gains in life-expectancy. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

The problem seems to be that human nature is willing to work very hard for $20 (if that pays for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) or for a $20 million xmas bonus (if that's your second vacation home) but we're all pretty slack-assed when motivated by any sum in between.

Absolutely right. You simply cannot have more of your life spent not working then you do working. Think about it. You work from age 21* to 65 or 45 years. During that time you average paying 30% of your income in tax. You then live to 90. That means you spend 46 years not working. That 46 years needs to be funded in some way and the maths simply doesn't work. That 30% tax had to cover all those things we like, such as roads. There isn't much of it left. So unless you saved 50% of your take home du

I think a lot of people here are misunderstanding what the F-35 is doing and where the 'can't fly' comments are coming from. Basically, your average current F-16 and F/A-18 are still very maneuverable jets. They're relatively light when flown clean and so they are still competitive in this configuration. In order for these planes to go to war effectively, you need to hang a whole pile of mission equipment off of them. IR and laser designator pods, weapons, extra fuel. This makes them heavy, draggy, and slow.

F-35s carry a lot of fuel and all of their mission equipment internally to preserve stealth. It also means it is less heavy, draggy and slow because the jet is aerodynamically clean when it is flown operationally.

For a very narrow suite of missions, this means you are carrying some stuff you don't need. For America, these missions will typically be F-15/F-22 territory. For every other set of missions it is much more efficient than any other strike fighter out there because it won't have as much reliance on external tanks or airborne tankers.

I'm not saying it doesn't have it's problems. It's stealth is only refined in the forward hemisphere. It is expensive and I feel it is forcing countries to adopt smaller fleet sizes to buy it. It does IMO feature design compromises that are forced upon it from being a close to common a tri-service, VTOL capable jet. But, the politicians did that, not the designers.

Sometimes a new thing looks like a disaster for a while, but in the long run proves itself. The M-16 rifle is a tremendously successful design, but there were issues with the first models that made it look like a huge mistake.

So I am watching the F-35 and I am wondering: will this be as big a disaster as the nay-sayers claim, or will this work out in the long run?

I'm guessing it will limp along as a middle-of-the-road thing: not a complete horrible disaster, just a really expensive airplane that doesn't live up to its expectations.

Also, I have read that it is intended that a bunch of F-35s will share data with each other, and help each other detect and deal with threats; but the giant costs of the program have made it much less likely that enough F-35s will fly together at one time for this to work out.

One thing I am certain about: It's a mistake to try to replace the A-10 Warthog with F-35s. I don't even understand how the F-35 is supposed to do the same mission.

Probably a little of both. In the long run, it is likely to be an amazing jet. Pilots say the thing is just amazingly capable, and near impossible to fight against. So while it is expensive, it pays for itself in terms of a force multiplier. Like say it could take enemy jets 11:1 which cost 10% of the price (I'm not saying it can, just say). It is actually superior then, since you spend less on it. Even more so because you keep your people safe and that has all kinds of repercussions.

One thing I am certain about: It's a mistake to try to replace the A-10 Warthog with F-35s. I don't even understand how the F-35 is supposed to do the same mission.

That's like asking how a rifle can possibly replace a pike, since it can't do the same thing. The F35's sensors and guided munitions are multiple generations more advanced, so it does the same mission from well outside of gun/eyeball range.

All these posts comparing the F35 to much older aircraft like the F18 on the basis of airframe are clueless. It's all about the sensors, weapons, and comms. The part you can see from the outside is just to get you there. (Of course, stealth and mach 1+ without afterburners helps with getting there, too).

Having a fly-off of the F35 against (what exactly?) is like having a race between a Corvette and a Ford Torus. That doesn't necessarily mean the Corvette is a better solution for your needs, and it may well not be a better value. But the differences are big enough to be obvious. Weigh them and make a choice.

The A-10 can fly slowly enough to stay for a long period at the site of action, can continue flying even being heavily damaged and have a cannon capable of destroying tanks. Put an F-35 in the same scenario and it would be a fireball in the sky in a few minutes.

I don't care if the F-35 works as planned. It's just another totally corrupt vile thing the Harper government of Canada is doing to lower the nation down to the likes of the USA. (I'm American and I realize we are not #1 at anything. except perhaps the number of literate creationists and global warming deniers.)

Canada could have spent all that $$$$ on robotics and then they could lead the world in the field... plus they could hire China to make a million dumb drones then put in their robotic brains... then

The F-35s suffer a fundamental design flaw: the wide body. The wide body is needed to accommodate the VTOL that the marines wanted but it really fucks up performance. Most any 4.5 gen craft should be able to outperform it handily, and at a much reduced price.

There's no reason why the F-35 shouldn't work well. Just drop that stupid vertical takeoff requirement and tell the US Marine Corps to work together with the Air Force. That would have dropped the development costs significantly.

The real question is, what are actually the Canadian Air Force requirements? I seriously doubt that Canada needs stealth strike fighters to patrol the remote north. Who's radar do they want to evade? What really irks me is that the so called conservative government wants to blow a s

One thing I am certain about: It's a mistake to try to replace the A-10 Warthog with F-35s. I don't even understand how the F-35 is supposed to do the same mission.

The F-35's primary mission is to make Lockheed Martin shitloads of money (the secondary missions being to make its subcontractors shitloads of money, and get politicians shitloads of campaign contributions). Since the A-10 is not made by Lockheed Martin (or anybody else anymore), the F-35 will be infinitely more successful at its mission.

The problem with the A-10 is that its already built and flying. That doesn't generate tons of money for defense contractors and politicians like developing a new aircraft does. The F-35 has the same compromise that every "one size fits all" design has. It does everything "OK", but not as well as a purpose built aircraft could and costs a ton of money to achieve it.

Well, if you look at the initial failures if the M16 and F35 as black boxes, this seems like a reasonable analogy. On the other hand if you open up the black boxes to see what actually happened, the analogy falls apart.

The M16 rifle's initial failure was due to deploying it with different ammunition than it was designed for. The ammunition used powder that was incompatible. Also, soldiers were told (incorrectly) that the M16 was self-cleaning. If the F35 were failing for an analogous reasons, those reaso

Of course there was no fly-off and the requirements were tailored for it... THE ONLY OTHER 5TH GEN FIGHTERS ARE THE F22 AND ONES BY RUSSIA AND CHINA THAT CANADA CAN'T BUY.This isn't controversial. Canada wanted a modern aircraft, and right now, there are only 4 out there. The F22 isn't for export, the PAK FA isn't for sale, and the J-20 (based on stolen F22 tech) is still light years away, and also not for sale.

If there was another candidate, I am sure Canada would have compared them, but when facing $124m

Don't buy peacetime designs - they are never great. The urgency of war forces designers and engineers to act quickly, with well-defined briefs and no extraneous "nice to have"s; peacetime designs are the opposite - bloated, every Tom Dick and Harry involved wants his pet add-on, and no pressure to get it out the door.

All the great military aircraft ever built have been produced in wartime for the jobs needed doing right then. And I include Vietnam and the Cold War among them. The post-soviet skirmished the west has got involved in don't seem to need fighter planes at all, and in the meantime, the bloated F-35 slithers along, as unpopular as Jabba the Hut.

OR - a place to outsource your defense development to. Canada has money, the US has the jets. The US population (face it, Boeing is kept alive by taxes) pays for all the endless R&D and other countries can just buy what they need.

Or you could buy 250 super hornets at the same price. The ONLY advantage of the f-35 is stealth, and given that a stealth fighter was shot down I'd not put much faith in the stealth capabilities of these things.

No not really. The high price tag of the F5 includes the whole logistical support package, training, bases, repair facilities and more. Buying a hundred planes with no spares or maintenance means that you can fly only 100 missions - at most - then they are all parked on the runway forever after.

Cute, but they aren't really buying them right now. It's agreeing to buy from one of the tranches in future.

The issue is whether or not they were going to (re)open the bidding process and under what terms. We could buy aircraft right now if we wanted to buy used, or we could buy Eurofighters or modernized F18's reasonably quickly. F18's and F35's would come with industrial guarantees (we buy x billion in aircraft we get some fraction of x in guaranteed production of boeing or F35 parts in canada). Or a c

The Russian and Chinese generals must have watched the same movies because both countries are developing and fielding their own new (5th generation) fighters. No one yet is fielding drones or defenses to match the 5th gen manned aircraft. Maybe the drone replacements will work, maybe they will have their own huge development problems.

No-one is willing to risk using drones that could be interfered with by the enemy over manned aircraft. If the drone needs a data link to a remote pilot it can be jammed or taken over and turned around. If it is autonomous it still has to rely on things like GPS or other navigation aids, and is vulnerable to all kinds of attacks from the air and ground. Drones don't have enough intelligence deal with what a technologically advanced enemy can throw at them yet. Even the Taliban are developing some effective

Fighter Jets became useless 20yrs ago. They're only still around because the current generals running the US military grew up whacking off to topgun.

That's a common misunderstanding. A fighter jet is not an offensive weapon. It doesn't serve to win the war. It serves to dominate the skies so that the rest (ground troops, bombers, helicopters, battle ships...) win the war.

So... does having a good fighter jet make you win the war? No. But not having them sure as hell makes you loosing it!

Without the protection of the jets any tank, ground operation, battle ship can be jumped at any time by an enemy jet and turned to ash.

Which brings us neatly to the F-35: it is meant and conceived as a stealth bomber but not as an air dominance fighter. So will it enable the US and it's allies to dominate the skies? For me that is the real question.

Unfortunately drones aren't quite there yet. This will probably be the last manned fighter purchased by Canada, but we're not quite ready to go drones-only at this point.

That's actually been one of the only really solid objections to this purchase... it can be persuasively argued that it makes much more sense to try and extend the lifespan of the current CF-18 fleet (or purchase new CF-18s with a much lower price tag than the F-35s) and wait 10-15 years for drone technology to further mature. I'm undecided on the issue. We do need new fighters in the interim, and the F35 is a fantastic piece of technology, but I'm not convinced it's the wisest decision at this point.

It is best to look at this as an economic stimulus for Ontario. The $9B price tag is for the whole package, including the new air force bases, repair facilities, training facilities, spares production, and so on, over the next ten years. An existing programme such as the CF18 will always seem cheaper, since a lot of that already exists.
Ontario's economy is in the gutter and they need something to get them going again. It is a Federal way to force Alberta to bail out Ontario, without stepping up the transfer payments.

The actual planes are not particularly useful at defending Canada against the occasional rogue polar bear or dead bloated whale...

There isn't anything fantastic about the technology in the F35, especially not for the price, but not even when ignoring the economical aspect.

Modern block designs of F16 and F/A18 have comparable avionics to the F35. The Silent Eagle F15 is just as good at avoiding enemy aircraft radar as the F35, and there is no reason the same technology could not be applied to F/A18's except lack of demand.

There is nothing wise about the F35 except throwing a bone to the US government. Which of course is a big part of a

I think you are confusing creating a military defence force with a vassal state making a tributary payment.

For those various vassal states like Canada and Australia, that money would be far better spent on turning infantry and armoured units into mechanised combat engineers with full infrastructure building skills. Basically as a part of the extended training doing full trades apprenticeships. Of course you shouldn't let that training go to waste. So when the Federal government sponsors infrastructure spending they send in the combat engineers to do the labour, as they are already paid for and it applies their training honing it in a most useful fashion. Then all the government then has to pay for is materials creating huge savings on infrastructure spending. Of course the military are then useful beyond the service employment and easily go into construction careers. Even that ever demanding corporate US military industrial state should consider making that switch in order to repair it's deteriorating infrastructure.

Seriously, the reality, you want to defend you country, just look at North Korea vs Iraq. Just a handful of nukes is all you need. So forget tributary payments to the US in the form of buying tanks and planes just make your own long range stealth cruise missiles and arm the with nukes. No matter how big that invasion force one or two nukes and they are gone, just like they were never there. Never there being the normal outcome of the threat of tactical nukes.

North Korea has Seoul in artillery range and a Chinese protector. They didn't need nukes from 1953 through 2009, and they weren't invaded even when it was well-known that they were developing nukes. See also: Iran.

For those various vassal states like Canada and Australia, that money would be far better spent on turning infantry and armoured units into mechanised combat engineers with full infrastructure building skills.

I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but if you believe current political rhetoric, Australia's biggest military threat is 16 year olds in leaky fishing boats running aground on Ashmore Island.

If Russia wants a piece of northern Canada, they're taking it, 65 jets or no. The US presence there might keep them away, but otherwise Canada isn't winning any wars.

That's not really the point. Having advanced weaponry also allows Canada to have the ability project their force and affect peacekeeping missions or global security.

If they were worried about Russia invading, they would develop nuclear weapons. Fortunately, Canada is under the nuclear umbrella of the US and does not need to do this. Much like North Korea is under the nuclear umbrella of China.

Umm, are you trolling or completely naive about geopolitics? Canada is a NATO member. An attack against one is an attack against all. There are three nuclear armed NATO states, and all three of them share common languages and cultural heritages with Canada. They aren't likely to look kindly upon any attempt to violate her sovereignty.

More to the point, Russia's MO isn't to invade her neighbors. It's to destabilize them, using restless minorities. That strategy works in poor countries with disparate ethic groups that share no common history. It isn't likely to bear fruit if applied to a rich developed country and I doubt that Moscow would try.

Im not sure what world you live in where our response to Russia destroying a $5 billion military asset would be to quietly retreat.

Im also not sure what world you live in where they have the capability to destroy one of our carriers. We have 10 carriers and 62 destroyers. Russia has 1 carrier and 13 destroyers. We could go into nuclear weaponry but I dont think Russia is that dumb, even in a scenario where they decide to attack northern Canada.

Russia has never invaded Western Europe or North America. It is always the other way around. Russia is an ally, not an enemy. Go and read your neglected high school history books. They are Slavs and they take care of other Slavs, whether the other Slavs like it or not...

Like they "took care" of Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Chechens, Tatars, Hungarians, Germans, Poles, lots of other people who weren't slavs but weren't liked by Stalin. Millions of them ended up dead in Siberia.

Be glad that Russia never reached as far as Western Europe. Not for the lack of trying though... They planned to "bring the communism to Europe on the tips of bayonets" since 1920s, but their hands were too short. Oh, and then there was this guy Hitler who got 20 million of them killed... And then there were nukes.

Why would they want Northern Canada? They have enough problems trying to keep China out of their South-East. Their country is biggest on the planet and has a very low population density already.

Jets are mainly needed for patrol and "believable defense deterrent" - i.e. showing any other regional power that may want to attack that you have enough defenses to make it exceedingly difficult or impossible to do so. Of course, with US as your land neighbour, that makes for a one tall order...

So let me see if I get what you're trying to say. Russia, the single largest country in the world, that has exactly one problem with oil and other resources - it lacks people and investment to actually get those resources out of the ground will care about Canadian resources enough to go and grab them? The Russia that sold Alaska to US because it simply could not use its resources and needed investment just to put what it has on the Eurasian continent to some use?

I'm not sure how many hits to the head it takes to be that stupid, but it must be quite a lot.

Canada's number one rival in the North isn't Russia. It's another country called the USA. There is a conflict over a part of the sea near the boundary between Alaska and Yukon.
Canada's number two rival isn't Russia either. It's Denmark. Canada and Denmark both claim a tiny island which is on the border between the two countries.
Russia does not claim any territory claimed by Canada.

Canada doesn't have nuclear weapons due to our own internal laws. Nothing to do with the US, and at the time when Canada decided not to house nuclear weapons in Canada, the United States was not too pleased.

But Canada hos no problem with US nuclear armed ships and aircraft being in Canada [wikipedia.org].

While it has no more permanently stationed nuclear weapons as of 1984, Canada continues to cooperate with the United States and its nuclear weapons program. Canada allows testing of nuclear weapon delivery systems; nuclear weapon carrying vessels are permitted to visit Canadian ports; and aircraft carrying nuclear warheads are permitted to fly in Canadian airspace with the permission of the Canadian government. There is, however, popular objection to this federal policy. Over 60% of Canadians live in cities or areas designated “Nuclear Weapons Free”, reflecting a contemporary disinclination towards nuclear weapons in Canada. Canada also continues to remain under the NATO 'nuclear umbrella'; even after disarming itself in 1984, Canada has maintained support for nuclear armed nations as doing otherwise would be counter to Canadian NATO commitments.

Not necessarily - they could just go straight over (or under) the North Pole, It may not be the shortest route (I haven't checked distances), but it's certainly the path of least resistance, unless of course Canada has armed their polar bears and mooseseses [snopes.com]

Sweden and Finland have the means to produce nuclear weapons.Same goes for most other countries with nuclear research facilities. It's not as if it's difficult.

It is apparently fairly difficult and expensive to make small, lightweight nuclear weapons. France was still doing nuclear tests in the 1990's, presumably because they still had kinks to iron out in their design.

US military bases in Canadian territory? That would be news to me and, I suspect, to our government and military. There are certainly joint exercises here, and US military personnel working with Canadians, and occasional visits by US ships and planes, but no permanent facilities.

Yes what Canada needs is a cheap aircraft. Cheap to work on, cheap to fly and cheap to buy many more.
The crews can then get many more hours in and work well as a team.
Why play with one jet ready to fly per location when Canada could have its crews getting lots of real flight time on many more aircraft.
Real flight time as a team is what builds any airforce. Not simulators, not rationed hours only for the very best.
Day, night, low level, complex mission over a longer time without the stress of having to